Fabian's Astrophysics Website

I maintain a software tool called scatfit, which I designed and implemented in 2022 to perform scattering fits of very low-S/N fast radio burst (FRB) data. Its primary aim is to measure the scatter broadening incurred by a radio signal (impulse) as it traverses various Galactic and extragalactic turbulent …

The comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is nicely visible from central France. The best time to observe it currently is shortly after 20:00 CEST, i.e. about 50 minutes after sunset and roughly 30 minutes before it sets.

It becomes visible in the West at low elevations above …

We had the Fête de la science 2024 science festival at the CNRS research campus in Orléans this weekend, 5 - 6. October. Each of the institutes on the CNRS campus presented itself and its research activities to the public in a simplified and (hopefully) entertaining way.

The LPC2E institute, which …

As of 2024, emails are typically received through Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, where the individual emails are kept in a centralised storage. This has the advantage that you can access them from several email clients or devices and always see the complete set of emails in the same …

Elie Daoura’s Master’s M2 student research project with us ended recently. I was his day-to-day supervisor over the last five months, together with Dr. Jean-Mathias Griessmeier.

We wish him all the best in his future career and good luck with his applications.

I recently submitted the Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes (SUSPECT) paper I to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal and submitted it to the arXiv shortly afterwards. It gives an overview of the SUSPECT multi-telescope observing project and demonstrates several new data analysis techniques on a small subset of the …

For future reference, the following recipe works well to get CNRS Eduroam WiFi access working on a Macbook Pro.

Eduroam configuration website.

The linked website provides a “mobile profile” setup file, including the right certificate that will be installed under System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Other -> Profiles -> User -> eduroam. You will …

I recently submitted the following three photos to the 2024 CNRS photo competition called “Regarde la science”. Please see the images and their descriptions below.

Caption: Overview of the Nançay Radio Astronomical Observatory. The photo shows the three main radio telescopes that our research group uses to observe radio pulsars …

I recently attended the MeerKAT@5 conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The conference celebrated the first (approximately) five years of science operations of the MeerKAT telescope array. I presented the “Sample Properties and Implications from the MeerTRAP FRBs Discovered with MeerKAT” as a contributed poster.

Fortunately, the organisers made most …

Here is a recent group photo of the CNRS Orléans/Nançay pulsar and Fast Radio Burst team as of February 2024. The two PhD students were present for the photo, but the 2024 Master’s students had not yet arrived. Other team members who are primarily based at the Nançay …

So far, I have always maintained my publication list manually as a LaTeX file, adding new publications as they were accepted or made public. However, doing so was an extremely tedious and frankly dull task, more so because some application processes require you to submit separate lists that include all …

I recently uploaded our scatfit pulse profile scattering fit and simulation software to the official Python Package Index (PyPI). That means you can install it simply by typing

$ pip install scatfit

in one of your shell windows.

As scatfit includes compiled binary extensions to speed up the model evaluation (by …

Killian Lebreton recently finished his Master’s M2 research project with us with waving flags. He did an excellent defence presentation and wrote a strong Master’s thesis report. He will graduate from the University of Orléans’ Physics programme in early 2024.

I was his day-to-day supervisor over the last …

My MeerKAT FRB paper was accepted for publication!

Please find the abstract and selected plots from the paper below.

We present a sample of well-localised Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) discovered by the MeerTRAP project at the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. We discovered the three FRBs in single coherent tied-array …

We had a good representation of the Orléans/Nançay pulsar and FRB team at the 2023 Kerastari neutron star & FRB meeting in Greece. Overall, we had five talks from the group covering topics from FRBs and pulsars to SETI.

It was a truly excellent meeting! The talk quality and topic …

I recently started a new academic research position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Université d’Orléans in the beautiful city of Orléans, France. I will work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts as part of a more extensive multi-wavelength collaboration and with several radio …

We had a bit of a “paper splash” today with 4 new MeerTRAP FRB papers posted on the arXiv this morning. I just wanted to quickly share the excitement with you, as it is quite a rare opportunity, at least for such a significant release.

Please find the links to …